Having to maintain solace for a very marginal potential mana gain is not worth it.

This is simply not true, the mana gain is not very marginal, it can provide substantially more mana, and solace/HF is just too good to not use on cd. Even during heavy damage periods the instant evangelism stack + instant heal is worthwhile, especially for disc whose "real" heals are not that much stronger compared to atonement, even when used to full efficiency.

Smite and holy fire on target is all that's really required. I'm also using a macro for my t6 talents (swaps automatically between them), my shadowfiend (petattack), void shift macros for my tanks and a few cds macro'd together (e.g. one binding for engineering trinket+ss, and one for each individually) so I don't have to use several clicks for different off gcd spells at once. If you prefer to have a few less bindings I suppose the last few things aren't that useful. I'll type out the macros that aren't completely obvious:

T6 (if anyone could fix this so I don't have to use the spell for the tooltip to update I'd be deeply grateful):
#showtooltip
/cast cascade
/cast divine star
/cast halo
/script m_c=GetSpellInfo(121135); m_ds=GetSpellInfo(110744); m_h=GetSpellInfo(120517)
/run SetMacroSpell(".", GetSpellInfo(m_c) or GetSpellInfo(m_ds) or GetSpellInfo(m_h))

Shadowfiend (I take off shadowcrawl autocast in pvp, you can remove that line if you purely pve):
#showtooltip Shadowfiend
/cast [nopet, nomodifier] Shadowfiend
/petattack
/cast [modifier:alt] Shadowcrawl

@Saryn, shhh we must not question or discuss his opinion/statements, that's not what forums are for!

You are talking to a new disc priest here. You lose sight of perspective. Having to maintain solace for a very marginal potential mana gain is not worth it. Sure, there are situations where even I think solace is better, but I still maintain the GCD loss and nature of moments where a tiny heal won't cut it leave plenty of margin for gaps in solace use. It's not worth the investment, especially for a priest coming back into disc.

Solace can and should be used close to on CD. If you run mindbender, you should be using HF close to on CD. Especially for new disc priests, it's an important habit to learn.

I can't even think of a fight where I'm not hitting smite regularly, so I can't imagine a scenario where I'd be constantly delaying solace.

Having to maintain solace for a very marginal potential mana gain is not worth it.

You should 'maintain' Holy Fire/Solace anyway as it is one of your best heals in almost any situation and those few where it is not will hardly hurt your mana or mindbender would likely not suffice either. Also, there is nothing 'potential' about it unless you have full mana all the time in which case you would 'maintain' Holy Fire/Solace for healing and damage anyway and Mindbender/Shadow Fiend just for damage.
Yes there are (possibly) (futur) encounters that work well with mindbender over solace, but the points you bring up are off and should not repeated to priests coming back to disc as you put it.

If you used one pw:s it'd obviously proc rapture as well, and even if the second shield is being absorbed fully it's quite mana inefficent healing. How many shields you can afford to toss out obviously depends on your spirit and outgoing damage (if you have 0 mana issues spamming pw:s in low damage scenarios I'd argue that you could play with less spirit though), but if you can deal just fine with the damage by using atonement over additional shields it's far more efficent. For high damage the solid hps combined with borrowed time obviously makes pw:s a really good choice to weave into your rotation, even when rapture isn't up.

I can't play with less spirit because I switch between Holy and Disc depending on the fight. PW:S is an instant cast that is roughly a 130k shield in my gear. Smite does 65k damage per cast if I average my crits and regulars together on a 1.5s cast. Further, my PW:S is on a TANK.

I can't play with less spirit because I switch between Holy and Disc depending on the fight. PW:S is an instant cast that is roughly a 130k shield in my gear. Smite does 65k damage per cast if I average my crits and regulars together on a 1.5s cast. Further, my PW:S is on a TANK.

Well, it's still more mana efficent and added damage, so unless the added output from PW:S is necessary there's no real reason to use it in a low damage situation (which is what I'm talking about). Saved mana can always be useful, if only to spam binding heal over PoH in high damage aoe situations, but yes if you are overusing spirit you don't lose as much from spamming shield when it isn't necessary (but people properly geared for disc do). That your shield is on a tank is kind of an irrelevant advantage in a low damage situation.

Though on a side note is anyone here using Macro`s?
As i used to use a few as holy but apart from perhaps a Macro to dps the target of my target with a smite or holy fire i dont really see the point.

I macro a couple of things (this is for 10N):

- spirit shell, power infusion, IF, AA
- penance with my on-use spirit trinkets, because I'm kinda lazy and want to make sure I get close to 100% uptime with them
- cascade target=me (gets cascade out there faster, and it then prefers the farther away targets so = bigger heals)
- if friendly target, smite/hf = target of target
- Flash heal with IF

At work so I don't have the macros right now to post, but they're pretty simple.

Well, it's still more mana efficent and added damage, so unless the added output from PW:S is necessary there's no real reason to use it in a low damage situation (which is what I'm talking about). Saved mana can always be useful, if only to spam binding heal over PoH in high damage aoe situations, but yes if you are overusing spirit you don't lose as much from spamming shield when it isn't necessary (but people properly geared for disc do). That your shield is on a tank is kind of an irrelevant advantage in a low damage situation.

In relation to the total outgoing damage/number of healers, most have parts with relatively low damage (meaning that you don't need to shield outside of rapture to keep them alive). What fights do you always have two tanks taking high damage at the same time forcing you to constantly PW:S both (meaning one outside rapture)? Not many at all. I'm not saying that PW:S outside of rapture doesn't have a place, it most definitely does, but if you don't need to use it to keep the raid stable it's generally a waste of mana (and probably the main cause for discs overstacking spirit/having mana issues).

Gotcha. So pretty much decide if Penance is going to be used to stack Grace on a tank or on the boss for Evang.

Yeah pretty much, due to the superior scaling offensive penance will still be roughly as good as defensive (though most of the time a smart heal is better than a targetted).